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Banned
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Originally Posted by Lebell
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1.)The Victoria Toensing Jan. 2005 "column" that you cite at the WaPo link is an "op ed", i.e., an "opinion" piece. It is not to be confused with news reporting by that newspaper or by other news or news wire services.
2.)There is nothing credible about Toensing or her husband. They are (if you call 300 TV appearances in a short period, extreme....) partisan to the extreme, and difficult to imagine as anything other than obsessive, self promoters.
Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv...uple022798.htm
The Power Couple at Scandal's Vortex
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 27, 1998; Page D1 .................
...........A classic Washington power couple, diGenova, 53, and Toensing, 56, occupy a strange, symbiotic nexus between the media and the law that boosts their stock in both worlds. They are clearly players, which gives them access to juicy information, which gets them on television, which generates legal business.
"Dozens of Washington lawyers are trying to get on these shows," diGenova says. "I think it's very healthy. We can destroy myths and shoot down misunderstandings." Toensing sees televised debate as a good way of sharpening the old legal skills. "It's something that gets the body juices going," she says.
<b>The two law partners not only talk about the Monica Lewinsky investigation -- they've been quoted or on the tube more than 300 times in the month since the story broke</b> -- but have been drawn into the vortex. Toensing was approached by an intermediary for a Secret Service agent who had supposedly seen something untoward involving President Clinton and the former intern. DiGenova was at the heart of a quickly retracted Dallas Morning News account of that matter. What's more, diGenova took to the airwaves Sunday to charge -- based on nothing more than one reporter's inquiry -- that private investigators "with links to the White House" were digging up "dirt" on him and his wife.
Never exactly press-shy when he was U.S. attorney, diGenova is a trifle sensitive to the notion that he is a partisan publicity hound. Ensconced in a burgundy armchair in the living room of his ranch-style home in Bethesda's Kenwood section, he glances stealthily at a blue card -- the kind TV people use to jot down their sound bites -- before delivering his point.
"I have never made a single telephone call to get on a television show, and neither has Victoria," he says. "We've never had an agent. . . . I've never been paid a dime for any of it."................
............A Wide Net
Name a high-profile investigation in this city and chances are the prosecutorial pair is involved.
Charges that Republican Rep. Dan Burton improperly demanded campaign contributions from a lobbyist for Pakistan? DiGenova and Toensing are the Indiana congressman's personal attorneys.
Newt Gingrich's ethics problems? Toensing represents the speaker's wife, Marianne, to ensure her compliance with House ethics rules.
A House committee investigation of the Teamsters and the union's links to improper Democratic fund-raising? DiGenova and Toensing are leading the probe as outside counsel.
(And don't shortchange Toensing's role. When the newspaper Roll Call ran an unflattering piece about conflict-of-interest charges related to the couple's hiring, Toensing denounced the reporter as a sexist for leaving her out of the first few paragraphs. "I'm just as big as he is!" she shouted at an editor. Toensing says now that "they pretended I didn't quite exist. They attributed my client to Joe. I've had to deal with this all my life as a woman.")
The couple's Teamsters probe for the House Committee on Education and the Workforce has made them a lightning rod for Democratic criticism. First there was grumbling that their official role would conflict with their work for other clients, such as the American Hospital Association, for whom they are registered lobbyists. Then the Democrats charged that diGenova and Toensing couldn't be doing much on their $300,000-a-year contract -- which requires each lawyer to put in 80 hours a month -- since they spent so much time in television studios trashing President Clinton in the Lewinsky case.
Their television advocacy is hardly a state secret. <h4>As former prosecutors, both diGenova and Toensing have largely defended the aggressive tactics of independent counsel Kenneth Starr and repeatedly challenged the president's veracity.</h4>
"They've become a public spectacle, which means they can't be impartial" in the Teamsters probe, says Missouri Rep. William Clay, the committee's ranking Democrat. "It's a payoff from Newt Gingrich and the Republican Party to both Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova. . . . They have been on television over 200 times and not once have they been talking about an issue we're paying them $25,000 a month to handle for the Congress. It's a hell of a part-time job."............
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3.) Heavens, no !!! The following portrays Toensing, when compared to the bold quote above.....as a...."flip-flopper" !
Quote:
http://www.slate.com/id/2304
.....Though both diGenova and Toensing are Republicans who are hostile to Clinton and supportive of Kenneth Starr, they usually argue against the independent-counsel law in general......
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4.)Victoria Toensing is on record as having a curious contempt for the law. What else could explain authorship of a "law", intended to safeguard national security, that is described by said "author" as:
Quote:
http://www.yuricareport.com/Corrupti...veCIALeak.html
"We made it exceedingly difficult to violate," Victoria Toensing, who was chief counsel to the Senate intelligence committee when the law was enacted, said of the law........
.............Based on the e-mail message, Mr. Rove's disclosures are not criminal, said Bruce S. Sanford, a Washington lawyer who helped write the law and submitted a brief on behalf of several news organizations concerning it to the appeals court hearing the case of Mr. Cooper and Judith Miller, an investigative reporter for The New York Times.
"It is clear that Karl Rove's conversation with Matt Cooper does not fall into that category" of criminal conduct, Mr. Sanford said. "That's not 'knowing.' It doesn't even come close."
There has been some dispute, moreover, about just how secret a secret agent Ms. Wilson was.
"She had a desk job in Langley," said Ms. Toensing, who also signed the supporting brief in the appeals court, referring to the C.I.A.'s headquarters. "When you want someone in deep cover, they don't go back and forth to Langley."
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But....what would one expect a close friend of Robert Novak, and an openly partisan republican like Toensing, to say, if not the quotes above? She is not in the habit of disclosing her friendship with Novak as she interjects her "opinion" in this matter, everywhere that she is able to.....
4.)Toensing did not disclose in the Jan. 2005 WaPo op-ed column, where she makes a point of defending her friend, Robert Novak, that she is his friend. Toensing has appeared on TV frequently since, and is documented as failing to disclose her relationship with Novak. This seems misleading and unethical.
Quote:
http://mediamatters.org/items/200501140005
Press sightings of social interactions between Toensing, her husband, Joseph E. diGenova, and Novak abound:
* An October 1, 2004, <a href="http://archive.salon.com/news/feature/2004/10/01/novak/index_np.html">article on Salon.com</a> reported that Novak was a guest along with Toensing and diGenova at a September 21, 2004, party in Washington to celebrate the success of the book Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry (Regnery, 2004).
* According to an October 17, 2001, "Reliable Source" column in The Washington Post, Novak was among "70 friends" hosted by diGenova to celebrate Toensing's 60th birthday at the Palm restaurant.
* A February 27, 1998, profile of Toensing and diGenova in The Washington Post reported that "[t]he couple retreat on weekends to their Fenwick Island, Del., beach house, hanging with such pals as Robert Novak and Bill Regardie." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv...uple022798.htm
Novak has also defended or praised his friends Toensing and diGenova on at least three occasions in his nationally syndicated column:
* "DiGenova, a conservative Republican, would introduce something new at the IRB [Teamsters union Internal Review Board]. He might recommend that it is time to end the monitoring that has cost the union more than $75 million. [Federal prosecutor Mary Jo] White did her best to obstruct the 1998 congressional investigation of the Teamsters conducted by diGenova and his law partner-wife, Victoria Toensing. Nor is diGenova an admirer of Mary Jo White's glacial pursuit of the pre-Hoffa conspiracy between the Teamsters, the AFL-CIO and the Democratic National Committee as the statute of limitations is about to block further prosecution." <a href="http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/robertnovak/2001/08/01/165366.html">[8/1/2001]</a>
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5.)The Toensing op-ed column is riddled with inaccuracies:
Quote:
http://mediamatters.org/items/200501140005
"Despite Toensing and Sanford's claim that Wilson was "credentially challenged" for Niger mission, Wilson had both <a href="http://www.cpsag.com/our_team/wilson.html">diplomatic credentials</a> as well as past experience investigating sales of Nigerian uranium. USA Today reported that "Wilson had been an ambassador to Gabon and was posted to Niger earlier in his career [with the U.S. Diplomatic Service, from 1976-1978]. In 1999, he had gone to Niger to gather information about rumors of uranium sales to Iraq." Indeed, Wilson has <a href="http://www.leadingauthorities.com/4881/Joseph_Wilson.htm">specialized in Africa</a> for the majority of his diplomatic career, which includes service in Niger, Togo, Burundi, and South Africa, as well as ambassadorships to the Gabonese Republic and to the Democratic Republic of Sao Tome and Principe. Wilson was also senior director for African affairs at the National Security Council under former President Clinton and also served as deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad from 1988 to 1991.
Toensing and Sanford also asserted that Wilson was sent in 2002 "to Niger to determine whether Iraq was interested in acquiring uranium from that country although he was an expert neither on nuclear weapons nor on Niger." In addition to ignoring Wilson's previous diplomatic experience in Niger and experience investigating the sale of Niger uranium, their assertion also misstated his mission: He did not go to Niger to determine "whether Iraq was interested," but rather whether Iraq actually purchased or attempted to purchase uranium. According to a July 7, 2003, New York Times <a href="http://www.yuricareport.com/Law%20&%20Legal/White%20House%20Admits%20False%20Data.html">article,</a> Wilson "was sent to Niger, in West Africa, last year to investigate reports of the attempted purchase [of Nigerian uranium by Iraq]."
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The Washington Post identified Toensing as "chief counsel to the Senate intelligence committee from 1981 to 1984 and served as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Reagan administration." Sanford was identified as "a Washington lawyer specializing in First Amendment issues."
Quote:
http://mediamatters.org/items/200510240007
USA Today again relied only on Toensing to suggest that outing Plame was not a crime
In an October 21 article, USA Today reporters Judy Keen and Mark Memmott relied exclusively on a reading of the law by Republican operative Victoria Toensing in presenting the question of whether senior White House officials may have committed a crime by outing CIA operative Valerie Plame.
The article marked at least the second time that Memmott cited Toensing -- without offering a contrary legal perspective -- in reporting that leaking Plame's identity likely wasn't a crime. Toensing has made frequent media appearances in defense of the Bush administration and the alleged leakers, but she is not the only voice on this issue. Former Nixon White House counsel John W. Dean III argued in 2003 that leaking Plame's identity might constitute a violation of the 1917 Espionage Act and, more recently, that it could also violate Title 18, United States Code, Section 641, which addresses the theft of information and, Dean wrote, contains "broad language [that] covers leaks" and "has now been used to cover just such actions."
USA Today did not mention that Toensing is a partisan Republican or that she is a personal friend of syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak, who originally outed Plame in July 2003.
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Lebell, in view of your decision to post links to the Toensing article on two threads, and your response and decision regarding my earlier Rove-Plamegate thread, made at a time when you admitted little knowledge of what was going on at TFP, I have to ask you if you have some kind of agenda, intending to steer our members away from more reliable information about "Plamegate"?
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpos...1&postcount=16
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Originally Posted by Lebell
This is the condensed version?
Truth is, I've been blissfully without news for over 2 weeks and don't even know what the current issue is.
But I can see that we are duplicating threads.
Merged.
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